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Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (The Lawrence Stone Lectures Book 7) by Chris Wickham is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (The Lawrence Stone Lectures Book 7) about?

A bold new history of the rise of the medieval Italian commune Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New World takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world. Chris Wickham provides richly textured portraits of three cities—Milan, Pisa, and Rome—and sets them against a vibrant backcloth of other towns. He argues that, in all but a few cases, the elites of these cities and towns developed one of the first nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that they were creating something altogether new. Wickham makes clear that the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to make of it. He describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes emerged, governed by consular elites "chosen by the people," and subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought ea

Author

Chris Wickham

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published

2014

Language

EN

ISBN

9780691181141

Subjects

History, Humanities

Rating

3.82 / 5 (9 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14